Embedded - 79: Not as Efficient as the Borg

Episode Date: December 4, 2014

Vicky Tuite (@vixter55) came on the show to chat with Chris and Elecia about EVAOS, a company that upgrades Ford trucks into plug-in hybrids. Feminist Hacker Barbie She’s Geeky Bay piggies (BayPIGgies)

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alicia White, my co-host is Christopher White, and our guest this week is Vicki Toot. As promised last week, she's going to tell us about electrifying trucks. Hi Vicki, welcome to the show. Hi Alicia and Chris. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Well, I've been in the electronics industry for 40 years now that I look back at it if you start school and I originally

worked in Oregon at Tektronix and they actually paid for my degree and about 25 years ago we moved down to Silicon Valley and I've worked in lots of different companies. But they've all kind of had hardware-related software in common, and the software's been kind of similar. But the hardware has varied between electric cars, servers, graphic accelerators, hearing aids, and steam engines. And now I'm back on electric trucks. Steam engines? Steam engines. Steam engines. I do not usually associate those with software. steam engines and now i'm a back back on electric trucks steam engines steam engines steam engines

not usually associate those with software yes well in her linkedin uh she she has a section where she talks about doing hardware debugging software development and testing on the boards that monitor and control steam engines yeah that company is called terrajoule and it's still going they're primarily energy storage 30 000 gallons of water is a pretty cost-effective way to store energy and the steam engines allow you to produce electricity and mechanical motion for driving a pump from the hot air hot water and steam inside the tank i i had this idea of a little car that you were running with a steam engine i was kind of hoping for that what you say makes so much more sense but i hope you don't mind if i continue with the mental image oh sure yeah it's more the size of a half a car, maybe.

And the pistons are about six inches across and about a foot or eight inches long. And they have multi-pistons in each engine. Some serious power, probably. Yeah, yeah. Or torque or something. Yeah, I can't remember exactly the power ratings. But you said it's like a generator storage mechanism. Right, right.

So it could produce 100 kilowatts 24-7. Well, that's enough to kill someone. No kilowatt. I mean, that's enough to power a few houses. Yes. Yes, a small village. And they heated their water with solar troughs. Okay.

And then a heat exchanger into the, into the big tank. That's the, the big book of thermodynamics there. Yeah. Everything, every kind of heat engine imaginable. Yes.

Yes. With a steam engine expert of which there are very few, Robert Mirish. But now you, you, you're back to electric cars yeah and while i said electrifying trucks i think except in the most wrong interpretation uh that's that's not quite what evios evios evios is uh some former tesla people i used to work there too at tesla at tesla motors it's been like six years ago now how odd i hate it when that happens yeah and uh evios provides the battery pack the battery monitoring system we buy buy the drive control unit and the vehicle-to-grid unit from another company, also another Tesla-related startup.

Oh, and we also do the drive shaft modification. We take the original drive shaft out and put in two shorter drive shafts with the motor in the middle. So you're making a hybrid car. Right. Truck, actually. Actually, a Ford F-150 or 250. And so you take these stock cars and you modify them.

Right. In fact, we even have Fremont Ford doing a lot of the work for us. Oh, well, that's nice. Yeah, yeah. And in the end, it's not battery-powered. It's more like... It's a hybrid. It makes a very perky drive for a Ford F-150,

and you get 40 miles per gallon while you're still in the hybrid mode range, which is about 30 miles. Because unlike the Prius, which is kind of designed to be not a fast car, the Ford F-150s have a lot of power to start with, and this just adds torque. Yeah, it does.

Especially at the low end, because of the electric motor. Yeah, right? Yeah, it makes it, it gives it a lot of torque. So if you're pulling a heavy load, or primarily you just get a lot, you get double the mileage per gasoline. This is a parallel hybrid, where the gas and electric motor both driving yeah they're both okay they're both well you can have the gasoline engine by itself once you've run out of battery juice juice but

it doesn't charge the battery from the engine like a Prius? No, it doesn't. So it's a pure plug-in. Pure plug-in. Ah, okay. And it looks like not only could you plug into it in order to give id power, but you could plug your tools into it. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah.

That's really cool. There have been so many times I wish I could have plugged something into my Prius that was, 12 volt. The models we were doing for our government contract actually don't have that, but it's pretty easy to do to put a well, it's not. We're intending to put an inverter that's driven off the pack eventually.

So you said government contract. Are these mostly government trucks or fleet vehicles or home vehicles? We have a contract for 32 trucks that are destined for four military bases. And there's four other vendors in this program with us, like Nissan Leafs, Via Motors, Phoenix Motor Car, and one other, I can't remember. And so they're all doing vehicle to grid projects. So all these cars will be plugged into the grid at night. And then there's two other companies doing energy management software. One company is making a smart charger in a box to control the charging. And another company is doing basically energy arbitrage detection.

Say, oh, it's going to be a good time to sell to the grid. Let's sell. But then they still have to make sure the cars are charged in the morning. Right. So you just have to be smart about it. And a 32 doesn't sound like very many, really. Is this one of those prototype things where in the end you might get more, or is this just the government sticking its toe into electric vehicles?

There is a potential follow-on phase to this project, depending on how well the first phase does. But you've done other, I mean, government's not the only thing EVOS is working on. I mean, I know that when I talked to you before, it wasn't quite ready for people, you know, my brother-in-law drives a F-150 and drives a lot. He doesn't. It's a Chevy.

Oh, we'll do Chevys eventually. If he ever hears this, I don't want him to get offended. I mean, our long-term plans. Really? I'm mostly kidding. He drives some sort of truck. He drives a giant truck, which he actually needs and uses, unlike a lot of people. Ah, the guitar players and bands.

You really do need that much space. So eventually Evios would like to produce a kit for consumer trucks and sell them through four dealers. But that's a little bit way down the road. And so now it's fleet trucks, which makes a lot of sense when you're talking about contractors and putting together, you know, 32 trucks. Yeah, yeah. How long does it take to pay off? I think it's, you know, two to five years, depending on your mileage. I think

the sweet spot is 30 miles a day. Most days you'll get, you'll pay it. You'll save a lot in gasoline costs. And we think you will save, save some in truck maintenance. We think it'll be a lot easier on the engine and the transmission. So given that the pure electric miles is, I think you said, 40? It's hybrid miles, actually. It's not pure electric. Okay, but in high efficiency mode. Yeah, the engine's pretty well slacking and just, you know, not using half its normal gasoline.

So that's pretty much targeted toward sort of quasi-urban areas rather than Texas where somebody might be going from one ranch to another 100 or 200 miles. Yeah, you know, things like airports where the truck is running around every day but it doesn't really go very far. Makes sense. airports where the truck is running around every day but it doesn't really go very far makes sense or maybe you know maybe contractors you know who don't have to travel very far but but as we found at tesla you know 98 of most vehicle trips are 30 miles or less yes but everybody wants to be able to go further yeah yeah, yeah. You know, what if there's an emergency and I need to go 200 miles? Like, okay, in my life that has happened once, maybe twice.

Well, sometimes you take trips that are longer that aren't necessarily emergencies. But you can always plan those. Right. Yeah. Well, so we still have the gasoline engine as a backup. Right. That is the nice thing about hybrids. Have you ever been quizzed about the environmental impact of batteries versus fuel savings?

People ask me that, and I'm like, I don't know. I just wanted an electric car because I can solar power it. Well, there's an aspect of our program that I'm not sure how much detail I can go into, but it involves repurposing the batteries in stationary applications after they're taken out of the trucks in about three years. I did hear a rumor, Sam, about some other electric companies, electric car companies, doing something similar where using old batteries to store, charge in other places. Yeah, I mean, batteries, until they totally go kaput,

kind of degrade at a constant rate. Well, and they are recyclable even beyond repurposing them. I mean, they aren't completely just things that go into a landfill at the end of their lives. Yeah, and these batteries are lithium poly, which are not, you know, they're not lead, and they're not lithium ion, which are kind of more dangerous than the lithium poly.

Do you have to do all of the software things to keep it safe? I mean, a lot of the car software needs to be much more safety conscious than, like, I don't know, sport watch software. Yeah, we have a battery monitoring system, and we also have some environmental sensors like impact sensor or the trucks on its side we will disconnect the main contactor but primarily the battery monitoring system is for keeping the batteries at the relative about the same amount of charge because overcharging one particular battery is bad for it, and it starts to degrade.

And under-discharging any one battery is even worse for the battery. Under-discharging? Yeah, if you let the voltage get too low, it's bad for these particular kinds of batteries. So you're saying if they're out of balance, most of the battery cells could be at 20%, but one could have gone down to 5%. Yeah, yeah.

And that would be bad for the 5% cell. Yeah. And so our battery monitoring system, which is basically, it's based on chips made from Texas Instruments, which the TI guy told me that the Tesla Model S uses the same chip for this. It monitors the battery voltages and temperatures. And then we have a different chip that calculates state of charge.

That's a really tough problem, right? It is. Because lithium batteries tend to be at nearly the same voltage all the time. Until they're not. So you can't just look at the voltage and say, oh, it's 50%, because 50% may look a lot like 80%. It does. There's a very flat curve until the drop-off.

So, yeah, you can't look at voltage for state of charge and also the whole curve moves up and down depending on temperature that sounds like a nightmare so we're hoping the ti chip works fine this is why even with the small devices the there's often the fuel gauge chip which yeah is so critical to to making sure you get reasonable lithium polymer battery states. Yeah, yeah. So what do you do for EVOS? I, four engineers and one technician report to me. Two of the guys are doing mostly analog, mixed signal,

board level design. One guy is doing firmware and one guy is a test engineer. And so what do you do? I run around and try to keep them supplied with correct information usually. So manager, that's totally

the definition of manager. Keep them supplied with correct information usually. So manager, that's totally the definition of manager. Keep them supplied with correct information and don't tell them things they don't need to know. Well, I also try to keep them happy. Occasionally give them a toy to play with. Yeah, and then I go to meetings and I try to badger the other companies that are our partners for information. And then in my spare time, I'm working on a Django project, which is our battery inventory system.

And you've been a manager before. Yeah. But for most of your career, it was more engineering. That's right. Why have you gone to the dark side? My boss just gave me a promotion. That's what they always call it i'm not so sure but i mean are you are you enjoying it were you looking forward to different challenges and all that or was it there was nobody else well there was nobody else but i'm not quite

sure if he was aware that i had previous management experience. Oh, I see. But there was nobody else. That's the way it usually goes, or at least that's the way it's gone in my past. But since I've done it before, in a way it's order of magnitude more challenging because I think some of us are engineers because we like to control things.

And with people, it's just much more of a challenge that way it is i i've heard engineers go off on rants about how managers why do they make more money and i the first time i was a manager i swore i was never ever gonna have that rant again because it it is hard well i've never actually been a manager where i made significantly more money it's never significantly more other that's what the rumors say my first management well the second real management gig was at sun when they were you know just starting their big slide and they you and they froze all promotions and office moving. So I didn't get to move to the nice, really good window office, and I actually didn't get my promotion.

You just got all the responsibilities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So much for all of the rights and privileges. It's just the responsibility. Yeah, that's really all I got. Well, plus I didn't have to do any more real work exactly real work even as a manager you say that but that's not the case here well although i have done a lot you know less like i've um uh uploaded the or gotten the microchip pic ide IDE working on my computer like once,

months ago, and haven't had to do it since because the firmware guy is taking care of it just fine. It was always the hard thing when I was a manager. I had to have the compilers on. What if I needed to do something? And yet I would see them, and I would be so sad when I was a manager is I had to have the compilers on. What if I needed to do something? And yet I would see them, and I would be so sad when I opened Excel instead of a compiler. Yeah, my theory on management is that managers should be willing

to do the stuff that falls through the cracks and let the talented people do the hard, interesting stuff. I mean, my job is interesting because it's so different every day. One of the things I have to do real soon is some investor outreach to some friends of mine. That's weird to come to friends and say, can I have some money? Yeah, yeah.

You do it more tactfully. It's not like, oh, I'm sorry. I left my wallet at my desk. Can you cover me for lunch? It's not quite that level. It's like,

come on down and see what we were doing. And by the way, my boss has a new slide deck he wants to show you. It's kind of like being invited to your neighbor's house for a Hawaii presentation. Tupperware party? Yes. Oh, yes. Time share.

Mental note, don't have lunch with Vicki any time in the next month or two. You worked for Tesla, as you mentioned. Yeah. How is that the same? How is it different? Tesla was so much bigger. And Tesla, since they're doing a whole car, they had to be so much the UL testing for the vehicle, the grid part. So we just have to make it work and make it safe. We probably have to do some EMI stuff, but we don't have a lot of regulations that we have to follow

because we're considered kind of an accessory to a vehicle, not the vehicle itself. That's surprising. Is there a threshold beyond which you've made enough modifications to be considered something that has to be crash tested? You have to replace 51% of the drivetrain. Well, we've done that, but we haven't actually changed much else underneath the truck. There's a lot of brackets to hold things, but basically,

and we tie in to various signals like the throttle and the shifter, but we don't actually do anything with them. Which is fine as long as you tie in properly. Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like you managed to add this part of the drivetrain without having to find a lot of extra space or or having to encroach upon usable space well the motor itself is barely bigger than a bread box okay and then the rest of the battery pack goes in like a over the bed toolbox so it is you know many cubic feet but it's kind of out of the way

in a pretty safe place and there's even we even left six inches so you can slide some plywood underneath was ford helpful in putting all this together? We have a good arrangement with two Ford dealers, and Ford itself is somewhat aware. I think it's a thing that they don't want to do themselves just yet. And they also said that our modifications would not void a warranty, so that's a very helpful thing to have. Oh, that's nice. Yeah back to tesla actually so you said it was much larger but that was when they were

were they doing the model s or was that when they were doing the they're doing the roadster they you know i was employee 125 so it was still quite a lot of people even in engineering it's funny some people say 125 and that's small and other people say 125 that's gigantic well then they at that time they um two years later they were at 300 yeah and then two years later in one day they were at 200 whoops that's why I'm no longer at Tesla. I was going to ask, but now that makes sense. Yeah, it was kind of the dark before the dawn for Tesla. They were afraid they weren't going to get that $500 million DOE loan. Yeah.

And everything was costing more and taking longer. Well, it was right around the time when doing anything that required capital was impossible. Yeah, yeah. So a few months later, they got the loan and they went and resumed their hiring binge. Now they have over 6,000 employees. Yeah. Well, and now they're shipping lots of cars. Lots and lots of cars. Yeah. Well, and now they're shipping lots of cars. Lots and lots of cars.

And they're starting to fill up Numi, I've heard. When we took a tour, and it was fantastic how much they had filled two years ago. It was just huge amounts of space of things. You don't really think of how much stuff has to go into a car until you walk around and you're like, oh, I guess if you are going to build 100 cars today, you're going to need 100 motors and 100 batteries and 100 doors of each kind.

Hundreds of each kind of switch and hundreds. Yeah. And it's all got to be there. The cable assemblies were just boggling. Yeah, it looked less like a factory, more like an Amazon warehouse. Yeah, it did. Yeah, yeah. It's a logistic challenge for sure.

Even with our small Batatracks, it's one of our challenges. Allison, Chaykin was on the show, gosh, about a year ago, which means the show has probably missed another birthday and I forgot. But she said that cars have hundreds of microprocessors. How many are you adding? You mentioned two. Yeah, our system has two. There's one in the drive control motor or motor, you know, the drive control unit.

There's another one in the drive control motor or motor you know the drive control unit there's another one in the v2g and then our two other partner boxes each have one that i know of so i think we're only adding six and they're all canvas ones well and you mentioned knowing when it's on its side which may lead to a micro accelerometer and i know the accelerometer I was playing with today definitely has a microcontroller in there. Yeah, I guess I'm... We don't count those. No, I guess I didn't.

It's just, you know, it's a thing you buy. And I suspect that our battery management ICs are more like microcontrollers than simple devices. Yeah, I didn't count those either. So what else should I ask you about EVOs? I mean, I kind of understand how it works, but what else is really cool? We're hoping to expand to other types of vehicles once we get this order done with.

And I think we'd eventually like to do a pure EV vehicle ourselves or make a modification to a stock vehicle and maybe take out the gas engine entirely and put the batteries in there or something. It does seem like the next step. It's interesting because i've always thought that trucks were well suited to hybrid hybridization especially if you think about how trains work trains have always been well before they were steam after they were steam engines their diesels

hooked up to electric motors because they get so much torque that way it seems like that's a no-brainer for trucks they should always have been that way yeah yeah because they they can hold the battery weight like i just bought a ford c-max energy and it's taking up half my truck space with the battery pack that's the full bat that's the full electric no it's it's the plug-in hybrid where i get i get 80 of my commute in pure ev mode and then then it goes to engine but i am getting about 50 miles a gallon i've filled up like four and a half times and i've got 2800 miles on it yeah christopher was saying not too long ago how much he did not miss gas stations. I hate gas stations. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to stand there.

In the cold. Playing with your phone, getting it dirty. In the cold California sun. Exactly. That's when my windshields get washed by me. We have had a little bit of a problem with keeping the windshields clean. It's been one of the hard things with having the Prius is, you know, it needs its windshield washers cleaned twice as often as it needs gas.

So moving along to something entirely different, we talked on the show a little bit about the Hackbright Hackathon that was supposed to be for women getting into hardware, new to hardware. And after talking to Angie on the show, she asked if I would give a little talk towards the end and a rah, rah, rah, let's finish and go home and love hardware forever sort of thing. And when I saw you, I was sure you were there as a mentor. Because, you know, this is not your first embedded system. But you weren't. What did you build there? And why? Why? Why did you sneak in as a like ringer on a team?

Well, I, a friend of mine had a friend who was sort of back in town and was interested in Arduino, and I told her about this, and I thought she would be more comfortable if I was on her team so she'd know somebody. But even better, my daughter just moved back from living in Seattle for seven years, and I wanted to work with her as a peer. So, you know, I'm sure I'll be doing it as a mentor eventually but they seem like they're adequate mentors and I just wanted to work on a team with my daughter What did you build? We built this thing that well some of the tools that we were given was uh electric imp and this uh leap leap

motion wave your hand gesture recognition system and another and then there was another one by another company so we had this um kind of contrived game where you waved your hand over one thing and it went over the internet and told you what to do and you could wave your hand over the other one. Sort of as Simon says, but with fingers. Yeah, I mean, I was hoping to make it more of a disabled person support thing where they could just sort of wave it, wave your hand in front of it without having to actually initiate a conversation.

And then it's sort of like an easy check-in to the internet, or, you know, to whoever might be monitoring. Sort of that little ringy bell you get when you're sick and instead this would be the silent version yeah but you wouldn't actually have to i think some people feel guilty about disturbing people so if they could just kind of wave their hand to say i'm okay and the other person would get a a text or or something or maybe the other person would get a text or something or maybe the other person could respond somehow or there might be different hand motions for different things.

Yeah, you remind me, we had Maxwell on the show. Actually, you know Elizabeth Brunner. Yeah. And she came on the show to talk about her neighbor and worrying her neighbor would fall down and nobody would know. And so we built Maxwell, which was an electric imp. And if you didn't pat him every day, he would text your friends and family and say, just check in. Check in on the neighbor.

Pretty similar concept, I guess. I think there's more of a niche for that. Checking in without being intrusive sorts of things. But now having had Maxwell for not quite a year, but almost, when he doesn't work, it's really annoying. I don't know that I would give him to elderly someone for a long time. Because when he breaks, it's really annoying i don't know that i would give him to elderly someone for a long time because when he breaks it's so annoying why does he break i mean that just seems like a little bit of industrial engineering when that works oh networks wi-fi okay they just i I mean, I know we've had some network problems here.

But that's just the thing. Networks are never going to be, at least right now, they're never going to be perfect. So if we have problems that we can't solve, your random neighbor is going to be hopeless to solve them. Right. Although maybe the part of the product could be the network detection, and it might store up what happened, and then when the network does come back, because most outages come back pretty quickly, you could say,

oh, she waved at me an hour ago, everything's okay. Yeah, the queuing. I don't think it does that right now although it could i remember thinking about doing it um but also it doesn't i don't know the the electric imp in our network lately has been very fussy i should have matt back on the show demand you tell us what's wrong debug matt debug right Matt. Debug right now. And it's a neat project. But even as I talk to more clients, because I'm kind of floating free right now looking for new contracts, some of them have been, oh, we're

just going to do some easy Bluetooth low energy to monitor Alzheimer's patients. And I'm like, okay. That's an interesting application and one I really think might be cool. But so far you've told me how to set it up and your setup procedure takes an expert. So maybe reconsider. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

I think I'm storing up a rant about electrical products and the elderly and how they just can't be difficult. Oh, I forgot another not quite so important part of our project, but I did use Twilio as a... Oh, for texting. Send a text that somebody was ready to wave at you. I was pretty pleased at how easy it was to use Twilio. Yeah, yeah. And electrician made that really easy. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, if you're only going to send 10 or 100 texts a month, I think it's free. Yeah. Certainly, they send me emails saying, do you want to upgrade? And I'm like, for my one text a year, you must be kidding. And I'm sure if you had bulk quantity of texts it wouldn't be that much per text anyway no no not really so you mentioned uh your daughter and i wanted to get back to that because it frustrates me when i hear technical women who are unhappy with their lives say how

bad it is and they discourage their daughters from the path from any path that involves computing you didn't i didn't when my daughter was 10 i got her a geocities account and i put some stuff in it and then i showed her and she was horrified she said take it down take it down and i said well you have to do that and i handed her an html manual i'm not sure what to call that it's child abuse well it's just it's like handing somebody a bomb and say defuse this or or yeah it's not that bad no it's not that bad i'm just i'm just in my mind i'm thinking you know houdini's son okay kid get out of these chains well Well, my daughter.

My husband's also an engineer. Well, actually an engineering writer. So, you know, she was probably not going to be able to go too far away from engineering. And she did end up getting a dual degree from UC Santa Cruz in computer science and math and a master's in computer science from the University of Washington. And she's currently working on her PhD, although she's taking a bit of a break

in computer science from the University of Washington. So really, she's still trying to get down that GeoCities page. No, well, GeoCities took care of that for her. You have to go to the Wayback Machine to see it. And so how else did you encourage her? Did you maybe put her prom pictures online with little mustaches and she had to take them off? No, no, that's about all I was able to do.

I mean, she had her own website pretty much after that. She put her own prom pictures up before there was Flickr, actually. And she did something cool recently. Because you offered to give up your spot to be on the show so that maybe she could come on. My daughter did the website behind Feminist Hacker Barbie, which was a thing for... A meme. Yeah, for three or four days. So basically there was this hideous computer engineer Barbie book,

and it had things like, well... I have a quote. Okay, you got a quote. I pulled a quote. On one of the pages, Barbie is asked, what are you doing? And she says, creating a game. And what is it? I'm only creating the design ideas, Barbie says laughingly.

I don't need Steve and Brian's help to turn it into a real game. I know. Which is fine if it was product manager barbie or designer barbie but almost almost every page of the book was of that ilk it was so bad so um kathleen gave the internet a chance to correct that and some of them were just hilarious and so she did the website where it would put up a picture in the original text and give you the opportunity to modify the text so that it would match the picture.

Yeah, and then it would give you a place. Well, initially it was uploading it to Imgur, and then the weird stuff happened, and so you still had the capability to save it and post it to your own Twitter account. Yeah. And there were so many of those that went by. I liked the one where somebody said it was very brave of the Brian character to use a pink laptop and go against gender norms.

Oh, yes. People did a really good job at flipping it on its head. Yeah, yeah. Without necessarily being mean yeah yeah and then um bbc and yeah you got a bit of press for that one yeah yeah so uh she did an interview on npr and the best story about it with the most juicy technical details is in wired would you have predicted that when she was 10 details is in Wired. Would you have predicted that when she was 10?

Well, there's a lot of things that I've predicted poorly. Most of anything that's happened in politics in the last 18 years. But I'm not that surprised. I think a lot of people have that capability, but she just happened to do it with adequate execution that people could use it and run with it. Didn't Mattel ever talk to her? Not that I know of. What was that look for?

Not that I know of, and then you were playing the microphone. No, yeah, I don't think so. I think it probably falls into the parody category. Oh, I hope so. Oh, there's nothing they could do to her. Oh, not at all. Right. there's nothing they could do to her. Oh, not at all. Right. You know, there's always hassling.

That's free. And actually, Mattel got a lot of publicity, and if they had adequate PR, they could turn it around and saying, oh, we're... They could sell two. That's the thing, is if they were smart, they would put out two computer engineering Barbies, and people would buy both.

Well, the old one's been pulled. Probably a collector's item now. Exactly. And yet, I'm not going to go out and buy one. The cynic in me says they did this on purpose. Oh, the new Coke debate. Yeah. I don't know. No no they probably did not but and the original author is getting

some grief over it which is a little unfortunate i suspect it's written on spec i mean he probably was told she was probably told see what you did i i know i know we have a guest who's coming up at the end of the year and i wasn't sure which gender because i've only seen the the internet name and it's not indicative and we had like four email back and forths before it was finally signed by a name that was clearly one gender and i was like oh good finally i have a name you didn't do a linkedin check or is that i guess you have to have a name to do a linkedin oh okay good, finally I have a name. You didn't do a LinkedIn check? You have to have a name to do a LinkedIn check. Oh, he didn't have a name. The phantom hacker, huh?

Yeah, it was a very phantom hacker. Not gender specific. Well, not everybody is. That's fine. We met at the first, talk about long ago. Yeah, or one of the very early ones. Bay Area She's Geeky. Yeah, that's so fun.

I try and go every year. And you spoke about beekeeping, which is. Oh, yeah, yeah. Not the first time or the last time you've done that either. Yeah, at She's Ge's geeky i've talked about django beekeeping um kind of career advice for older women and last last year i did bead work with my friend who's much better at it than me can you guys describe what she She's Geeky is for those of us who haven't been or maybe have not heard of it?

She's Geeky is an unconference for women. So it runs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. You can go any combination of days. And when you get there, you kind of have circle time, which is introductions. And then there's a grid, and you go get this piece of paper, and you say, I want to teach a session on you go get this piece of paper and you say i want to teach a session on this and you kind of announce it then you go put it on it on the time slot grid and then room grid and people come to your sessions or not and you go look at other sessions to attend

that you want that look interesting to you and it's uh you know it as far as conferences go it's pretty pretty inexpensive i don't know maybe 75 a day maybe less less if you yeah if you talk to them if you want to be a gopher or yeah if you're a student or if you're younger or if you have any good excuse you can probably talk your way into cheaper tickets. Yeah, and I've paid for other people to go just because I wanted them to go. Yeah, it's not that expensive compared to conferences. And what you were talking about is the unconference part of it. The idea that conferences often are the best part

is the interstitial time where you meet in the hallway. Yeah, the hallway track. And that you shouldn't necessarily stay in a session because you signed up to go. You should be okay with leaving sessions and going in later. Yeah, definitely. It's an open source, open space technology, I think it's, yeah, open space technology. Yeah. And she's geeky, uses it, and what ends up happening is completely random things. Yeah.

You get beekeeping, you get deep talks about GIMP and how it works and how to use it properly and how to even modify it. I remember one year there was a whole bunch of people who wanted to know about writing a book, and so I went to that and I said, here, here's how you do it. There was another author and another woman from O'Reilly. Suzanne Axtell's usually there.

And it was just really cool. There are always sessions about how to speak at more formal conferences. Yeah, yeah, I went to an excellent session. It was really more of a workshop because I think she held the attendance down to six so we could all practice and get feedback. And that's something that this woman, I think, charges real money to do. And there are a couple of other speakers who charge money.

Yeah. I've never charged money for teaching soldering, but I did have a good time doing that with Jen one year. Wait, you taught soldering? I know, it was really hilarious. Oh, and last year I brought Arduinos. That was really fun, too. Oh, maybe we should do one this year.

We could. Yeah, and then the she's geeky part of it is that it is for women in tech. Or anything that you self-identify as geeky. Like my friend, the patent attorney. Well well that's geeky to me yes i mean whether it's beekeeping or beating or or talking about imposter syndrome or there's just i mean i think there was a session about writing science fiction it's it's whatever you deeply yeah i've been to a session on cryogenics. Oh, was it the first year with all the futurists game?

That was hilarious. No, it's just this woman who's getting her head frozen when the time comes. Well, who knows? Did she talk you into it? No. It's like, I don't know if I need that. But it is a good place to meet lots of people. It's where I met you.

It's where I met Jen. Yeah. I think it was the first time I met BJ Wyshynski. And these are all people, you know, they talk about networks are the most important part. Yeah, yeah. Going to the embedded systems conference is absolutely great for my career, but She's Geeky is a little better for my mental health. Yeah, yeah. Going to the Metasystems Conference is absolutely great for my career, but She's Geeky

is a little better for my mental health. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I'm sorry, we should actually get back to, you were here

to talk about Evios. Or other engineering things. Okay, what other engineering things? Well, I'm interested, I'm into Python and Django.

I'm a member of PyLadies. So you said Django a few times. I actually don't know what that is. Django is the Python. I'm assuming it was a language of some sort. It's a web development framework, roughly equivalent to Ruby on Rails, but it's written in Python for Python. Oh, interesting.

I don't think I've heard of using Python that way. Yeah, and it's spelled with a D, like the movie. Like the guitarist. Yeah, originally, yeah. Yes, you're right. It's the original Gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt. So what got you into that? Well, I've been a member of Bay Piggies,

the Bay Area Python interest group, for years and years and years. And I've even... Python has so many great names surrounding it. Yeah, yeah. And I go to... Well, there was actually a big controversy, Python interest group. And the name had been Bay Piggies,

and someone took offense, and there was a vote. For all piggy kind. Yeah, and there was a vote, and this person lost, and we never saw this person again, but the name remained. Oh, wow. And now that person has gone on to form bay area pie groundhogs it isn't as alliterative but you know it still works yeah so i've used python half dozen times seriously and every time i do i think wow this is really great i should use this

more for stuff and yet I still forget about it the next time I come around. Convince me that I need to spend more time learning and using Python. Well, Python I guess one of its many mottos is I came for the language, I stayed for the community.

The Python community was the first one of the first programming organizations I know of that had a code of conduct. But I think Python is relatively easy to learn. In fact, MIT is now using it for their introductory course. Really? Instead of Scheme, which is a list-based thing.

Wow, we were using that a few years ago that I won't name the number because it was large in our introductory course. And it has a lot of different libraries, so you can do pretty much anything you can think of. I mean, it still is a script-based thing, but there's implementations that are faster than others. However, it's probably limited if you want to do tablet and phone development. It doesn't have a good solution for that.

But for a web app or a standalone computer app, it's great. Even for Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black have really good Python implementations. Yeah, it's not so great for embedded system programming either. I think we're still using C that's been around for 30 years now.

Sometimes we do C++. There is some drive to get scripting kinds of languages onto micros. The Hackaday entries was a Python compiler slash board. Yeah, I've heard of, you know, there's some sort of MicroPython which is working towards that, but I'm not sure how mature it is. I think it'll happen, but I think, A, there needs to be a really good reason. And I think with the drive to make microcontrollers more of an educational platform,

I think that reason is starting to exist more. Yeah. You don't necessarily want to force 10- and 11-year-olds to learn C or C++. Although I think the arduino ide is a pretty good compromise it doesn't uh i think you can actually do pointers in it if you really really want to but you definitely can but you don't but you don't you can do almost everything you need to do without it on the tricky bit with python on something like that is python is so great because it's so expressive right you can in a single line you can do string manipulations that

and c would take many many lines or functions and that's hard to have that kind of library and support on a small device well i think the cool thing about python is that you can think of things in terms of lists or or dictionaries and manipulate them easily. And if your problem fits into that, it's so great that you don't have to wrestle C into it or build those things in order to solve your problem. Yeah. Well, and I've used NumPy and SciPy.

Yeah. Which, since I never really could pay for matlab we had a student copy for a while and occasionally i would work with clients who would get have copies but it's sad when i don't have access to that amazing wonderful tool and now numpy and scipy yeah they're pretty awesome there There is Octave, which works almost identically with MATLAB. Although, now, what is coming? There's something on the Raspberry Pi that you get

for free, like Wolf MATLAB or Wolfram or something. That's Mathematica. Well, Wolfram is Mathematica. Oh, maybe it's Mathematica. Which is different. Mathematica is more suited towards symbolic mathematics and solving. Whereas MATLAB is more suited towards symbolic mathematics and solving, whereas MATLAB's more

numerics. Thank you. Yeah, I do want to get better at using... Condescension. Sorry, that was from last week. Anyway, I do want to improve my graphing skills with NumPy and SciPy. I've done a little bit and they're

really awesome. Yeah, I've done a little bit, and they're really awesome. Yeah, I think as a second language for embedded software engineers, Python is definitely my choice. It's great for scripting things, too, if you want to write tests that talk to your device over serial or something. Yeah, serial or internet. I mean, there's so many different ways it can be used. And where Django really shines is if you need to have some sort of web app that has a database behind it.

Which is every web app, pretty much. I mean, remember 20 years ago when you just stored your data in some weird file format you made up yourself? And now you use JSON? No, some things just go to the database. file format you made up yourself. And now you use JSON? No. Some things just go to the database. Yeah. Christopher, you're working on something that may need some

web appiness. No, I'm not. Well, I mean, there's okay what is it does Django run on

the web side or on the server side it runs on the server side it talks to your

servers databases okay so it's the back end so I was yeah it's the back end and then it presents

pages to your browser yeah and the thing I'm working on has a back end of end, and then it presents pages to your browser. Yeah, and the thing I'm working on has a back end of its own, and I'm just talking to that. Okay. I was thinking about the times that I've had to do interesting web pages served by my device. And you can put JavaScript in there in order to get prettier things. Yeah.

And it's always really kind of made my brain hurt to embed javascript files inside my flash so that i could run it from my embedded system that does seem kind of icky well if you want i mean but if it solves a problem yeah it's it was the best solution i had i even thought about trying to speak at a javascript conference and i'm like who are you going to talk to? And you're just going to say things they don't want to hear. I know, they're going to say, like, I'll say, we need to keep JavaScript small so we can do this,

and they're going to be like, please stop talking. Well, when my daughter Kathleen did the Hacker Barbie app, it only took her a day because she was a pretty experienced Django developer, and it's a semi-sophisticated application. Yeah, it has all the pictures and all the text, and then you can have more text. Yeah. It was pretty cool. Only a day.

I've spent like a week on this ring. Don't ask me how long I've spent trying to do basic electronics this week. Christopher got his first SparkFun box this week. Wow. Yes. And then somebody considered stealing it. I considered hiding it for a couple of hours so that we could go to Halted so you wouldn't get distracted by the shiny red box, which you didn't.

You did very well. But then we went to Halted, and you still didn't buy anything for yourself, so I don't really understand why you... I just like to pet the equipment. You know what I do when I go to Halted? Well, I've done this enough. But they have some used test equipment, and they have 7B80 and 7B85 Tektronix 7000 Siri plugins.

And I always go look at each one to see if my name is on the calibration sticker. Because that was from my first job when I was 21 years old. I do occasionally see things that I remember from, not that I necessarily had anything to do with directly, but things that were common around the time I started. and they're just you know in piles and the really old stuff so yeah however if i did find one i i'd have to buy it and i don't have a mainframe to put it in trying to think of things like that that i could do and i remember when my toy that i had been working on was made fun of on The Simpsons,

and I felt like that was some sort of giant win for myself. Yeah, The Simpsons are kind of a cultural milestone. I've made it. I've made it. Yay! So, Avios. Really, I'm somehow going to get back on track here. Does it run Python anywhere?

Sorry. No, the only Python I'm doing is for my Django inventory control app, which I kind of do on nights and weekends. What kind of firmware is in it? I mean, it sounds like it works, so what other firmware development are you doing? Or is your

Minion doing? It's the PIC, we use the PIC MX32 series, and so there's

a microchip IDE and it's in C. And that runs the battery management? That runs, that talks to the battery management system, it talks to That runs, that talks to the battery management system. It talks to the sensors.

It talks to the drive control unit. So there's a user display. So a button to go in and out of hybrid mode and some diagnostic screens and a picture of the battery that says how much charge you're on. So that controls all of that and it gets all of its information from the can bus from the other processors who chose the pick um my guy dan because that was what he was most familiar with wait wait let me guess he was a double E no he's not a double E really he's a firmware guy

he's a very he's he's 90% he's a he's a pretty good double E even though he sometimes says

I'm not an electrical engineer I just don't want this to really break my confirmation bias with respect to double E's picking picks double E's like picks in software engineers like

what Atmel makes or what TI makes yeah I think our partners use the TI chip at least one of them I don't know what some of you know there's a couple of them I don't actually know what processor is in them but the drive control unit has some sort of TI

CAN enabled processor with CAN bus. Yeah. Honestly, I think it's probably what you were exposed to first, and since most micros of those classes do kind of the same stuff. Yeah, really. Well, PIC did a good job of actually giving the IDE away for free, so you didn't have to spend a lot of money on it. And it feels like such a waste to spend money on them

because they just are not very good. Although he is not very happy with Microchip's new MZ processor and they force you into their new IDE, and we actually went down that path for a way, and the processor wasn't ready, and we had to go back to the MX. It was more that the IDE wasn't ready, too. They hadn't ported all the libraries. You've worked at companies.

You know why. I know. I think Microchip, it appears to me, has gone on this acquisition binge and they're just haven't they're not as efficient as the borg at assimilating other companies and so they just have to kind of grind it out christopher do you have anything else to ask well i i was still on the car.

I had more questions on the truck. Oh, go ahead, go. Do you have, so it seems like in this day and age, it's popular to put all kinds of logging and phone home and radio. And do you keep track of these trucks? Do you have a GPS of your own? No, we do not have that, although we do have... You sound exasperated.

No, no, no. No, I mean, we don't have telematics. We just have some logging of CAN bus and other measurements that we will have to go physically extract or plug in a USB stick somehow. Do you look at a Bluetooth app for your truck owners? We haven't done that yet. In fact, the military bases are all...

They don't want that. They don't want any sort of Wi-Fi at all. They probably don't want you calling home over 3G either. They don't. So I think in the future products we will have that, but for now it wasn't necessary. What are you excited about doing next? I'm going to be excited to see those trucks loaded on that carrier.

Shipping things. Yeah. Well, I think that's probably a good place for us to stop asking you questions and let you get on with your weekend. Well, thank you. It's been great. Do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? No, I've been a, well, not frequent enough listener to your podcast, but it's great and keep it up.

Thank you. My guest has been Vicky Toot, engineering manager at Evios, maker of a truck hybrid kit. Thank you. And thank you to Christopher White for producing and co-hosting. Thank you all for listening

and those extra birthday stars. If you'd like to say hello to us, email show at embedded.fm or hit the contacts link on embedded.fm. I'll have Vicki's Twitter handle on the show notes, but if you want to reach her, go ahead and email us and I'll forward it along. Or I can say it. It's V-I-X-T-E-R-5-5. At?

Twitter. You know, that's my Twitter. Oh, okay. Twitter handle. Cool. And I have one thing to leave you with for this week. A joke, because, hey. And it's from Neil Patrick Harris.

I wish I'd thought of this joke myself. I drive a Toyota Prius. I named mine Judas. Judas Prius.